Cannabis News Roundup: March 8, 2013

(Politico) // “The people in the federal hierarchy are in an impossible position” when it comes to cannabis regulation, according to US Senator Earl Blumenauer of Oregon. He hopes to correct that with federal legislation introduced Monday.

(HuffPost) // The next day eight former directors of the DEA denounced Colorado and Washington’s moves to legalize recreational cannabis.

(EastBayExpress) // Cannabis possession may be a low priority for arrests in Oakland, but one in five drug arrests in the city are for cannabis. And 90 percent of those arrested are black or Latino.

(ACLU) // State Senator Mark Leno of San Francisco introduced a drug sentencing reform bill in the California State Assembly late last week that might change that situation. If passed, prosecutors could treat personal drug possession cases as misdemeanors.

(EastBayExpress) // Senator Leno also introduced a bill that would allow legal production of industrial hemp in California. It’s a revised version of legislation he put forward last year that was vetoed by Governor Brown. In the Assembly, Allan Mansoor from Orange County has introduced a new version of hemp legislation rejected in 2006.

(SFGate) // A SWAT team was called to a cannabis grow facility this week in San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood when it was learned that a robber was holding four hostages inside. Fear of being bitten by a police dog was enough to cause the suspect to surrender to authorities.

(SFGate) // That Bayview grow operation was described as being licensed by the city, but a home in the Inner Sunset district where a firefighter was injured, was not. About a hundred plants were discovered, along with grow lights and other equipment, once the fire was put out.

(SFGate) // “Pot is an extremely functional drug,” says a tech exec, partly explaining its popularity in Silicon Valley. And it’s good for relief from repetitive stress pain, too.

(ESPN) // Middleweight boxer Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. has been fined nearly a million dollars after testing positive in a drug exam. The drug in question was not a performance-enhancing substance: it was marijuana.

(Smell the Truth) // “You can’t roll a spliff on no MP3,” says reggae soul band The Lions in this music video.

[A Note to Readers: The Commonwealth Club of San Francisco sponsored a talk this week by author/journalist Martin A. Lee, Associate Editor of O’Shaughnessy’s: The Journal of Cannabis in Clinical Practice. His topic was the growing research on the therapeutic qualities of cannabidiol (CBD), a non-psychoactive component of the cannabis plant. I’ll be posting a summary of his talk in a special Cannabis News Roundup, titled “There’s more to marijuana than THC: Martin Lee talks about CBD.”]